ARM Expects Rapid Growth in Mobile PCs, Ramp Up in Servers by 2015

ARM officials said they aim to have more than half the mobile PC market by 2015, though they tempered expectations for the server space.

As Intel and
Advanced Micro Devices continue to make moves to encroach on the booming
mobile-device space, officials with ARM-whose chip designs are dominant in
smartphones and tablets-are looking to eventually take market share away in the
PC and server arenas.
During a press
briefing at the Computex 2011 show in Taipei May 30, ARM President Tudor Brown
told journalists that the company expects that by 2015, half of all mobile
PCs, including tablets and mini-PCs, will be powered by ARM-based chips, according
to reports.

In addition,
Brown said that while ARM-based servers may not ship in volume until 2015, they
are coming.

In all, Brown
made it clear that as Intel and AMD are looking to push into ARM's stronghold,
his company planned to take the competition into theirs.
"Today, we
have about 10 percent market share [in mobile PCs]. By the end of 2011, we
believe we will have about 15 percent of that market share as tablets
grow," Brown said, according to a report in PC World. "By 2015, we expect that
to be over 50 percent of the mobile PC market."
Intel
executives at the Computex show on May 31 outlined an aggressive roadmap for its Core and
Atom processors, which include features to improve performance and drive down
power consumption, both critical issues for mobile devices. Intel officials
already expect at least 35 system designs this year based on its Atom Z670 "Oak
Trail" platform, and are saying more tablets and smartphones powered by Intel
chips will hit the market starting in 2012.
In addition,
reports say that AMD officials are working on a Z-Series chip lineup-dubbed "Desna"-in its Fusion
line that will be targeted at tablets. Already Acer is using AMD's C-50 chip in
its new Iconia Tab W500 Windows tablet.
However, it's
an area that ARM designs-through chips built by the likes of Samsung, Nvidia,
Texas Instruments and Qualcomm-dominate. And it's that presence in the
fast-growing tablet market that Brown and other ARM officials expect to
leverage to rapid growth its share of the overall mobile-computing space.
In addition,
ARM will be helped by the decision by Microsoft-announced by CEO Steve Ballmer
during the Consumer Electronics Show in January-to enable its next version of
Windows to support SoC (system-on-a-chip) platforms like ARM's. Like Intel,
Microsoft also has had troubles penetrating the mobile-device space that is
dominated by such operating systems as Apple's iOS and Google's Android. By
enabling Windows to run on ARM-based devices, Microsoft officials are hoping
for another way into the space.
ARM also is
looking to make some noise in the server space, targeting systems used in cloud
and other compute-intensive environments where the key demands are around
performance and energy efficiency. ARM officials believe they have an advantage
over Intel and AMD in such sectors, because those vendors' chips consume more
power than ARM's. In December 2010, ARM CEO Warren East said he expected the
company's chip design to start eating into Intel's huge market share by 2014.
During the
Computex briefing, ARM's Brown said it could take a little longer. He said he
expects ARM-based servers to start hitting the market in volume in 2015.
"We
firmly believe this is going to happen. We know it is starting to happen right
now. But it's going to be several years [for the numbers to reach significant levels],"
Brown said, according to PC World.
Progress is
being made, he said. ARM last year unveiled its Cortex-A15 chip design, which
not only will offer five times the performance within the same power envelope
as current chips, but also such crucial server features as support for
virtualization and 64-bit computing. In addition, there are a number of
companies, including Marvell and Calxeda, that are looking to bring ARM's chip
designs into the data center.
However, Brown
said that an ecosystem-such as a sufficient number of business applications and
hardware systems-must be in place for such servers to take off, and that
creating such an ecosystem takes time.